CHAPTER VII
FORTUNATUS
If Stuart had been a poor man, and forced to continue drudgery whatever his troubles of love, he would have wrested a certain comfort from the obligatory effort. But placed as he was, it would have been mere childishness to deceive himself with an assumption that he was not perfectly free to absent himself from Holborn for as long a period as he pleased. Derwent had taken a needed holiday in May, directly following the prick of Gobert’s balloon, and was now back again at his post. Baldwin ran up most days from Sonning, except when solemnities of regatta nailed him to the spot. Business was at its slackest; and Stuart could no more persuade himself that he was morally necessary, than that his attendance was compulsory.
In no mood for make-believe, beset by a bitter craving for what he had denied himself, by a still more bitter doubt as to whether his had not been a fool’s action, he set out for the Haven, where he could at least be sure of solitude while he fought the matter through.
The Haven is marked somewhere in the neighbourhood of Poole. Actually, it is in the neighbourhood of nowhere. A man walks into the Haven perhaps at set of sun, finding it always a little beyond the point where he is desirous the walk be ended, so that he walks into the Haven tired and with lagging step. On one side of him the sea shines a ghostly grey; not breaking in waves, nor tossing in a glitter of foam, nor making any sound whatever; but flowing, flowing, in slantwise ripples towards the land. And when he is accustomed to the sight of it on his one side, he is gradually aware of a stealthy lapping on his other side, beyond the sand-banks sown with coarse grass. There also is the sea, flowing in slantwise ripples towards the land, so that he loses all sense of east or west. For his further confusion, either horizon is bestrewn with hazy tongues of land, floating strips of island; and on either horizon, tumbling silent seas lick their way among the nebulous shores. The sun dips red and round, and the moon rises round and red; so that for an instant of bewilderment the sun might be the moon and the moon might be the sun; and both sun and moon hang loosely, midway between sky and ocean, having no link with either. The only thing permanent is an old hulk embedded in the stretches of flat white sand; and thither the traveller is impelled to climb; for the sand has an untrodden look; and there lies a strange fascination, when leaning against the slimy sides of the wreck, in gazing backwards at his solitary footprints marking the way he came.
On the extreme edge of the Haven, men have built an hotel, thinking thereby to give the spot a prosperous and populated appearance. And thrice a week a creaking motor-bus deposits there its load of sightseers, who drink a lot of tea on the blank terrace, and swarm over the waste of garden, and onto the primitive wooden jetty, whence boats are supposed to start for a tour of the islands lightly pencilled in the haze. But the boats are never visible; and presently the sightseers depart in their bus; and the Haven continues to take no interest either in the barren grey hotel nor yet in the babbling tea-drinkers.
In the surrounding oozes of dark green, are rooted shapeless forms, that might be whales, but are mostly bungalows. One of these was presented to Stuart by his brother-in-law Ralph Orson, on the occasion of the latter’s marriage. “Might come in useful when you are sailing in these parts,” quoth Orson, apologizing for the poorness of the gift.
There was very little of sailing in its more graceful phases round about the Haven. Occasionally the tide brought up slow-moving barges, piled high with wood or coal or bricks; these surmounted by the tiny dark figures of men hoisting a clumsy bulk of canvas against the sky, pushing frantically at giant pole or tiller, which by comparison reduced the human to ant-size. The white skimming sail would have been here a strange anomaly, and the supple curve of pleasure boat. With grimness tempered to mystery by their flying streamers of smoke, the black trading-vessels alone ruffled the even slant of the water, flowing, rippling, landwards to the Haven.
Here then, Stuart passed the days following his renunciation of Peter. He was disappointed that the detached exultation of spirit was absent, that should have rewarded the man with will strong enough to perpetrate a theory. Exultation?—so far was it removed, that at first he had to summon every atom of force he possessed, to prevent himself from dashing theory onto the rubbish-heap, and setting it alight, burnt-offering to the common human love of a man for a maid. Just at the moment when all his powers of reasoning and thought and logic were most desperately needed, they turned traitor; ran away; returned to mock him: “Prig! pedant! cad!” No end to the insulting epithets they volleyed at the stunned and cowering leprechaun; and then ran again, too fast for pursuit or argument.
“If that’s all you have to give me, then, curse you, I might have taken the warmer thing!” thus leprechaun, from the depths of want, to the hiding metaphysician.
Stuart waited, just holding in check the suffering which cried out for some alleviating action on his part ... (he might so soon be in town—at Euston—Thatch Lane—“Come out, Peter”—and in the crushed sweet smell of bracken on the Weald, laugh, and kiss her mouth, and kiss again; and laughing, damn the Hairpin Vision to beyond eternity, where it rightly belonged—all this, so soon) ... Stuart waited. He would at least give metaphysics a chance.